Our AOE needed a buff, but this is probably too much and is going to get reeled back in. If my mental Swipe DPE is correct, doubling its damage would only put it 10-20% behind Shred, and make it the automatic go-to for fights with multiple targets. (well, 3+ for certain, would have to figure up rolling dots on 2.) We’d go from worst to first on H Maloriak, that’s for sure. Someone chime in and tell me I’m seeing things.

Oh, and the Berserk change is nice for cats but very nice for bears.

(Back to planning IA policy. Yay for real work, boo for real work.)

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41 Responses to “No way this stays.”

I haven’t run the numbers or anything, but I sort of guess that bleeds on single targets (assuming they live long enough) would manage to offset at least the damage from swiping two targets. It will be interesting to see if this makes it live and trying it on something like heroic halfus, that’s for sure :-D

I imagine it will stay. It looks like the patch is close to being live and this is one of those things Blizz tossed in to shut us up. They are more concerned with the final touches so I imagine this won’t even get looked at until it hits servers.

To me it’s only a help on Maloriak & Halfus. Maybe Omnitron if you are on slime duty. All other fights req ranged AOE. Tanks can have problems with threat when we blow zerk and swipe spam as it is. I can see myself eating dirt til I get used to it

So…hopefully Cower’s energy cost is reduced by Berserk also. :P I think the hybrid feral spec is going to get a LOT more use now. Hell, you pull threat while Berserk Swiping, just go bear and Enrage+Berserk Mangle. “Don’t worry, tank, I got this. :P”

Also, agree with Spw…This is going to cause lots of unintended consequences. They could’ve done the same thing much more subtly by simply reducing Swipe’s energy cost.

I’m continually surprised at how many WoW players there are in the Army, actually.
I might have posted this a while back, not sure, but I listened to a 4-star general reference WoW as part of a point he was making, saying essentially “look, these young people can self-organize into teams and gain knowledge if they have compelling incentives, we can do something like that for our Soldiers.”

I could be wrong, but doesn’t Multi-Shot hit for almost nothing, anyway? Something like 1-2k? A 250% buff to that will push it up to the 4-7k range, which certainly helps but isn’t quite the same as Swipe going from 10-11k to 20k.

I don’t know, reducing the swipe cost would make berserk-swiping crazier than it already is. I liked another poster’s suggestion I saw; they suggested increasing the frequency of OoC procs from Swipe instead.

This is nuts. Knowing our tanks, I am pretty sure I’m going to die a lot. I think swipe definitely needs a buff, however I am appaled that they still have overlooked the fact that FB is pointless above 25%. Can we get our John Madden back?

When our tanks have aoe situations i usually wait some until i mangle/rake.
With this im going for another bleed on the boss and then a swipe -> tf -> swipe x2
Probably. Hoping these changes will go live :)

Well all I can say is thank god for Glyph of Berserk? :P But yeah, this change does seem too good to be true. I think as soon as they see how good it will be with berserk, Ghostcrawler is going to charge, stun and crit us again with the nerf bat.

Bit late to the commenting party since I was without internet for the week, but yeah…would love for it to stick, even if it’s gonna be toned down. Such a shame as this would be beyond sick with UW up lol.

Bear swipe got its damage doubled as well. Fingers crossed its not intended, this feels almost excessive, like the devs are trying to make reparations after nerfing us all into the ground with the whole Survival of the Fittest debacle.

I don’t think doubling Cat Swipe is as out of line as some here think it is. Instead it highlights just how broken it has been for so long now. Swipe is not a sustainable AOE given its energy cost. Outside Berserk + Swipe spam our aoe will, after this change, go from outright awful to merely competitive/functional.

Our berserked swipe dmg will be very strong, but finally having a niche where we’re actually preferred is something that should be embraced and is by no means OP, given on demand AOE is most useful in limited contexts. When it’s good, it’s really good, but otherwise just average. The whole idea is more in-line with their X will be good and some fights and Y better on others. This whole expansion feral has been Z, preferred/competitive at none of the above. This change goes a long way toward remedying that deficiency. There has been no fight thusfar where a comparably geared/skilled Moonkin hasn’t been better than an analogous Feral. This is a step towards changing that.

Good reply. Some niche is better than no niche, certainly, but I’d like to see a tweak to FB to make it useful again. My main concern was that they had buffed Swipe to the point where it’d replace Shred for 5cp energy dumping, which would obviously be broken. Numbers are close, so that’ll be a wait-and-see.

Also, I didn’t realize HOW far ahead moonkin (and other casters) had gotten with AOE. I roughly calculated that H Mal DPS would go up by 25% or so, but didn’t realize that vaults us to the top of the melee pile but still leaves us behind moonkin/spriests/fire/demo.

/Agree, FB’s current irrelevance is a mutually exclusive concern and by no means is addressed by the change to cat swipe. Cat swipe on multiple targets will be more effective than 5cp shredding or tab dotting after the change, but then again it ought to be. That’s the idea behind a reasonable aoe attack :P No need to fear, swipe won’t be ahead of shred on single target 5cp with nothing else to re-apply spam. It will be akin to what mangling in the same scenario is currently (to clarify, it will be slightly better than mangling in that circumstance now, but not as good as shred.) It wouldn’t be the end of the world anymore to swipe at 5cp on a single target but it won’t by any means be optimal or for that matter equivalent, e.g. no one ‘doing it right’ will be swiping under those circumstances.

[…] Swipe (Cat) damage has been doubled. When this was first announced there were a number of surprised and jubilant druids – surprised because Blizzard made the change quite late in the PTR cycle without previously […]